Perl is a programming language that is platform-independent and freely available

Perl stands for “practical extraction and report language” and is a programming language that is platform independent and able to be interpreted. The scripting language supports multiple programming paradigms. When creating Perl, the goal was to develop a language that, on the one hand, contains the most important programming commands such as loops, branches and so on, and on the other, provides the possibility to perform search and replace operations in an editor. While many programming languages have a high degree of specialisation for specific purposes, Perl has been designed with the aim of solving many common tasks from different areas in a simple, casual and elegant way.

Perl can process large amounts of data

Perl is used for complex applications where large amounts of data need to be processed, such as the automated generation of HTML files or user data in a large computer network management. Due to its run-time properties, Perl is not often used for time-critical applications, and Perl is not necessarily suitable for 3D programming. Programs that are written in Perl are saved as ASCII files and compiled immediately before execution. This makes these programs easy to edit and transferable to other computer systems, and Perl programs are especially characterised by their high speed, especially during search functions. Perl is also freely available, including the source code. Perl is generally already installed on most UNIX or Linux systems, and there is also porting for many other operating systems like Mac OS and Windows versions. However, not all functionality is available for non-UNIX systems.